(click pic for larger version)

Wow, this is pretty cool. The print edition of the Wall Street Journal devoted nearly half a page to its review of the Slide remote. I had already read the online version of the article, but to see the print article with a giant photo of the remote is pretty awesome. Either it was a really slow news day or the Slide remote is just that cool. I prefer to think the latter.

Introducing the hands down, coolest remote in the world: the TiVo Slide! I’ve designed a lot of products in my career, but the Slide is, without a doubt, the one I’m most proud of and feel the most ownership over.

One of the most rewarding things for me about product design is being able to go into a store like Best Buy, see a product, and know that I designed it. Most people have no idea the amount of hard work, dedication, and creativity that goes into designing and creating great products. Understanding what it takes, seeing the end result sitting on a shelf, and knowing that it is, or will be, used and enjoyed by many people is a fantastic feeling. For me, it provides a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, and is one of the main factors that motivate and drive me.

The Slide remote, however, went a step beyond that. To come up with an idea, push that concept through the company, and then design and bring that idea to production represents to me another level of accomplishment. It’s a big part of why the Slide is so special to me.

There were certainly some unique challenges in designing a slider remote. Without giving away anything (we can’t just give away our secrets now, can we?), there were quite a few things to consider. Typical remote considerations like size, shape, button set/size/shape/layout, usability/ergonomics, and aesthetics were complicated by the need to consider all these aspects in both the open and closed positions. In many cases, the various facets would fight against each other (e.g., improving one area in the closed position would result in compromises in another area in the open position).

Of course the sliding mechanism presented plenty of challenges of its own. Just about every remote that anyone has ever used contains no moving parts. As a result, people are accustomed to remote controls feeling very solid. So how do you make something that slides (and is thus inherently not solid) feel like it’s solid, especially in the closed (and predominant use) position?

The challenges were many, but I feel really good about how they were ultimately addressed, and am really happy with the end product. Users seem to agree as initial feedback, both internal and external, has been overwhelmingly positive.

Out of all the early reviewers, perhaps my favorite line is from CrunchGear (emphasis mine):

It’s just the classic TiVo peanut remote shrunk down a bit with a sliding QWERTY keyboard added. But how is it in practice? Pretty much the best thing on Earth.

I have to chuckle a bit at the first line in that quote, but the last line in the quote more than makes up for it and affirms many of the design decisions made.

Here are some additional reviews: Gizmodo, Engadget, CNET, Dave Zatz (ZatzNotFunny), Dave Zatz’s video review, Wall St. Journal, Slash Gear, Electronista, and BetaNews.

We’re currently featuring the Slide remote on the front page of tivo.com (click on pic below for larger size):

Now if you’re astute, you may have noticed the “Watch Video” link. Well, our creative/marketing group decided to have me and our industrial designer do a little promotional video for the Slide remote. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it because even though I absolutely dread watching myself on that video, the unfortunate reality is that the video was a memorable event for me (hey, I didn’t say it was a good memory) and one of the primary purposes of this website is to help capture memorable moments in my life.

The video may be hard to find from the home page on tivo.com (and won’t be there forever) so here’s the direct link. It’s also on TiVo’s YouTube channel:

[sigh] I’ve really got to talk to somebody about changing the default frame in that YouTube video. I look bad enough in the video, but that default frame is particularly bad [deeper sigh].

Now onto some better looking things. Here are some pics of the Slide remote.

Disclaimer: Any and all content posted on this website regarding TiVo represent the views and opinions of the author only and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of TiVo, Inc.

The latest fruits of my labor: the sleek and incredibly sexy TiVo Wireless N adapter. It has the same design language as our original wireless G adapter, but several aesthetic enhancements to the design make it look far cooler.

For starters, the metal base is stunningly beautiful. Whereas the G adapter has a lighter colored brushed metal finish, the N adapter uses a black chrome finish giving it a much classier, sophisticated, and high-end look. It’s drop-dead gorgeous if I do say so myself!

With the G adapter, I was never quite happy with the logo treatment. The logo is printed on a label which is then stuck on – it’s basically a sticker which, perception-wise, just seems a bit cheap. The N adapter’s logo is monochrome silver and back (in and of itself cooler IMO), and the TiVo guy actually protrudes from the plastic, giving the logo depth. And not only is the face of the TiVo logo silver, but so are the sidewalls of the protruding logo.

Design details aside, the N adapter offers much better range and speed compared with our G adapter. And if you have a WPS capable router, then connecting the adapter to your router is as simple as pushing a button on your router and then pushing a button on the adapter.

Here’s some pics of our N adapter. It’s available now on tivo.com and various retailers.

Disclaimer: Any and all content posted on this website regarding TiVo represent the views and opinions of the author only and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of TiVo, Inc.

Today, we introduced the Premiere and Premiere XL which both feature the cool new wide-screen HD UI (High-Definition User Interface for the lay people). They also feature remote controls designed by yours truly.

To the casual eye, the Premiere XL remote probably doesn’t look much different from the current Series3 / TiVoGlo remote. However, there are some important changes.

Perhaps the most obvious is the inclusion of the four colored A B C D buttons which will be used for various functions in the UI. My feelings towards these buttons are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, I generally oppose adding any buttons to the remote. On the other hand, these buttons, particularly with the colors we have chosen, really add some nice visual pop against the glossy black plastic. And of course, I can see the benefit such flexible function buttons provide from a UI standpoint.

The battery architecture was also changed from 4 AAA batteries to 2 AA batteries. AA batteries are generally cheaper and more readily available than AAA, and the charge capacity of 2 AA batteries is actually higher than 4 AAA batteries. This required a slight expansion to the remote’s form, especially in the “waist” area, but the feel/ergonomic difference is virtually imperceptible. Some might even say that the slightly expanded waist feels better.

We also went with a new faceplate design. By “faceplate”, I am referring to the glossy black plastic that surrounds the keys. In the Series3 design, this was a clear piece of injection molded plastic that was painted black and then laser-etched to allow the backlight to shine through TiVo’s antennae and legs.

The Series4/Premiere remote uses a printed, cut, and formed piece of plastic (an applique in technical jargon). From a design standpoint, the appeal of this approach is that it enables the printing of a smooth gradient around the TiVo button (the white glow around the TiVo guy). The gradient/glow looks great in bright ambient light, but also in a dark room because it actually glows when the backlight is on.

Another big change (at least in the eye of this designer ) is that the TiVo button now actually has the true TiVo shape. In previous remotes, the TiVo body is very geometrical – it’s basically a trapezoid. The true TiVo guy has a much more organic body. When you compare the pre-Series4 TiVo button to the Series4 TiVo button, I think you’ll agree it looks much better.

From a backlight standpoint, we changed the backlight color from amber to white which results in brighter and more efficient lighting. We also utilized an improved light diffusion system which basically means that the backlight is more uniform among all the keys (reduced “hot spots” in which certain keys are more brightly lit than other keys). The Activity light (the light that flashes with each key press) color was also changed from red to amber to match what the user sees on the TiVo box itself – the TiVo box flashes an amber LED with each successful remote button press.

I’m also happy that our basic remote (the one that ships with the base Premiere) now has the improved Series3/Series4 form which is much more comfortable and ergonomic (and sexier looking!). It also has the Select button in the middle of the navigation disc. In Series 2 remotes, the Select button is below the nav disc.

So there you have it. There’s a bit more to these remotes than meets the eye. And of course, they’re perfect complements to our great-looking Premiere boxes. Go out and buy one and see for yourself!

Here’s some pics of the Premiere and Premiere XL.

Disclaimer: Any and all content posted on this website regarding TiVo represent the views and opinions of the author only and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of TiVo, Inc.

I’ve been HDTV shopping for several months now. Originally, I was debating between a 42″ or 50″ screen size, but after several excursions to the local Best Buy, I quickly concluded that 50″ was the way to go. Even for our relatively tiny living room, 42″ just seemed too small.

After looking at various TVs, I quickly eliminated rear-projection TVs from the running as I was unimpressed with their picture quality and turned off by their bulky size and issues with bulb life. The decision came down to a 50″ plasma or a comparably sized LCD. Plasmas generally offer better picture quality (deeper blacks and no motion blur) and for screen sizes 50″ and larger, they are more economical than LCDs. The disadvantages of plasma are slightly higher power consumption and the minor possibility of image burn-in, but the pros of plasma outweighed the cons for me.

Among the myriad brands to choose from, I gravitated towards Panasonic which consistently gets good reviews and high praise. In fact, Consumer Reports recently rated the picture quality of the Panasonic 50″ 1080p plasma the best they’ve ever seen. The fact that I have been very satisfied with my current Panasonic CRT only helped reaffirmed my brand decision. I nearly pulled the trigger a couple months back when Costco had the model I wanted on sale for $2,199. I reacted too slowly and by the time I decided to buy it, the sale had ended.

That turned out to be a good thing, however, as a month or so later, Fry’s had a sale on it for an incredible $1,699! It quickly sold out online, but they still had stock at the local store. As is typical, I went through some indecision in making the final decision. It wasn’t whether or not the price was right (it was undoubtedly a great deal), but whether or not we’d be better off getting a 58″ size instead. After staring at a 50″ and 58″ side by side, taking measurements of our living room, staring a bit more, and finally dragging Judy into the store to stare with me, we decided that 50″ was the way to go.

The day after buying the TV, we went looking for a suitable TV stand. As luck would have it, Best Buy had a sale for a really nice stand that we both liked. Judy, for those who don’t know, is freakishly strong for her petite size, and between the two of us, we were able to unload and set up the TV and stand (which I think weighed more than the TV!) with no problems. So far, we’re quite pleased with the picture quality (Lost is awesome in HD as are sports). We just lament that there isn’t more HD programming, particularly movies, currently available. And as for the screen size? 50″ turned out to be perfect.

So I jumped ship to Comcast once my DirecTV contract expired. Moving to Comcast also enabled me to replace our telephone line and DSL with cable internet. I knew cable was faster, but wow, it totally blows DSL out of the water! Check out this speed test:

My DSL speeds were a paltry 1.2 Mbs down and 384 Kbs up. Comcast has a feature called PowerBoost which gives a big boost to your download speed when you’re downloading a big file. Thus, these speeds are almost certainly not sustained transfer speeds. Nevertheless, it’s wicked fast speed when you need it. Now, even the biggest video files from RohJuh.com play instantly – no more waiting while the video buffers!

My entire cable install went smoothly, even the CableCARD part of it (I was able to get a single MCard instead of dual SCards). I’m still playing with all the TiVo features, but I’ve already downloaded and watched my first Amazon movie (Live Free or Die Hard for only $0.99!) as well as a bunch of free videos from MusicWatch. So far, everything’s been working well for several days now – knock on wood!

Pics of my new toy!

Well, I guess the launch of the new TiVo HD isn’t a complete surprise since its impending release was first discovered a little over a week ago. Although the sleuth who uncovered the leak didn’t initially blog about it, others soon found out and word quickly spread. It didn’t take long before the leaked pics and specs were picked up and posted by a variety of other sites.

The TiVo HD Box is the culmination of a lot of hard work by the TiVo team and we’re all quite proud of it. My contribution to this killer product? The sleek-looking bezel.

There’s also a nice splash page for the product at TiVo’s website that looks like this:

An HD TiVo with two tuners for only $299? What the heck are you waiting for?!! Go get one now!

Cool! We announced a partnership today with Amazon that will allow you to download movies and TV shows from Amazon’s Unbox service to your TiVo for viewing on your TV. This is one of the capabilities that I was most excited about when I joined TiVo, so it’s great to see it now finally becoming a reality.

The internet’s flooded with articles about the announcement. Here are a few from the LA Times, USA Today, and CNET. Here’s the link on Amazon’s site as well as the link on TiVo’s site.

As mentioned previously, installing Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp was pretty straightforward. Installing Pro/E and Intralink (the file library/management system that integrates with Pro/E) went largely without a hitch as well. I was a bit worried about potential problems in getting Pro/E and Intralink to be able to pull the required floating licenses from the corporate server over our company’s VPN, but to my relief, that too went pretty smoothly.

Performance was very good, as could be expected since my MacBook Pro is, for all intents and purposes, a high-end Windows-compatible laptop. Of course, having to boot out of Mac OS X and then boot into Windows to run Pro/E is certainly not optimal. I still sought the ideal solution of being able to run Pro/E from within Mac OS X. It was time to try installing Pro/E on Parallels.

The official released version of Parallels (build 1970 as of this post) does not have direct 3-D graphics support and neither do any of the subsequent beta releases. However, the recent beta releases have reportedly sped up graphics performance by up to 50% so I decided to take my chances and install one of the beta releases.

I installed the latest Mac Build 3106 Beta 3 of Parallels. The installation was very easy – just follow the on-screen instructions, enter the Windows activation key and insert the Windows CD when prompted. The 3106 build is able to use an existing Boot Camp partition to run Windows, which was really what I wanted to do since I already had a successful installation of Windows, Pro/E, and Intralink on Boot Camp.

Unfortunately, there were several reports on the Parallels forums of people having problems with Parallels using their Boot Camp partition. I therefore decided to simply have Parallels install another copy of Windows (basically the default, recommended installation for Parallels) and not mess with my Boot Camp partition. I hadn’t activated Windows on Boot Camp yet so I didn’t expect to have any Windows activation issues.

There are plenty of blog posts, articles, and videos showing Parallels in action so I won’t go into any of the general details of using Parallels. However, I’ve got to say that this is some really, really cool software.

The next step was to install Pro/E and Intralink. As with my Boot Camp installation, the entire installation process went smoothly and I soon had Pro/E and Intralink running within Parallels. So what’s the word on performance? Well, although it actually ran much better than I expected, there is a definite performance hit when compared with Boot Camp. Spinning/panning/zooming assemblies is noticeably slower with the assemblies often moving in lurches. Manipulation of individual parts seems to be a bit better, but still not as “silky smooth” as in Boot Camp.

I’ve created a short video showing the application launch process, some manipulation of an assembly and part, and a regeneration of a part (approximately 130 features). A few details of my setup:

- Stock MacBook Pro (2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667Mhz DDR SDRAM, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM)
- 1028MB RAM alloted to Parallels
- Intralink 3.3
- Pro/E Wildfire 2

To give you an idea of the size of the assembly, the assembly in the video is one of a remote control with less than 20 parts. It may also be worth noting that the Pro/E and Intralink application launches are from a fresh restart of Windows. Applications in Windows generally launch faster on subsequent launches.

The bottom line on running Pro/E on Parallels? I haven’t spent a lot of time on it yet, but I’d say it is reasonably usable if you’re working on individual parts or drawings. If you’re going to be doing a lot of assembly work, you’re probably better off using Boot Camp for now. Then again, since I lean more towards being a Pro/E “power user”, I may be a bit more finicky when it comes to these types of performance differences.

Although not quite ready for prime time for me personally, I am very impressed with what the Parallels team has accomplished – big kudos indeed! And at the rate they’ve been improving the software, I’m very optimistic that these performance issues will be addressed sooner rather than later. 3-D hardware support will supposedly be forthcoming in the next major release of the software so I’ll definitely be following Parallels’ progress eagerly over the next few months.